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CASABLANCA, Morocco, March 25 (JTA) — On a recent sunny day outside the Jewish elementary school here, Boris Azran watches as his two oldest children join hundreds of others colorfully celebrating Purim festivities. After a group of younger students perform a few Hebrew songs, older students, decked out in costumes ranging from Superman to Cleopatra,…

NEW YORK, March 22 (JTA) —It’s unlikely that the annual high school basketball tournament at Yeshiva University has ever experienced anything like the kind of media attention it got this year. Reporters from The Wall Street Journal, “60 Minutes II” and the New York tabloids flocked to Y.U.’s campus in Manhattan over the weekend to…

NEW YORK, March 15 (JTA) — Somewhere on a ship in the Persian Gulf. That’s where Rabbi Joel Newman will lead a seder this Passover. He’ll also lead seders, throughout the Passover week, in Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, bringing the holiday to Jewish personnel in the U.S. military. The seder provides servicemen and women…

NEW YORK, March 15 (JTA) — Somewhere on a ship in the Persian Gulf. That’s where Rabbi Joel Newman will lead a seder this Passover. He’ll also lead seders, throughout the Passover week, in Bahrain, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, bringing the holiday to Jewish personnel in the U.S. military. The seder provides servicemen and women…

FEZ, Morocco, March 2 (JTA) — Tens of thousands of Jews once lived in the Old City of this former capital of Imperial Morocco. Now only a handful remain within its walls — most have emigrated to France, Israel or Canada. But last week about 200 Jews — Moroccans and visitors — braved a driving…

NEW YORK, March 9 (JTA) — The Anti-Defamation League has long received threats from anti-Semitic extremists. What’s changed in recent years, said the group’s national director, is the increased level of seriousness with which U.S. law-enforcement officials take these claims. Since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 attack on the Alfred P….

NEW YORK, March 11 (JTA) — Stung by criticism over a now-canceled lecture series for Israel’s 50th anniversary, a liberal Jewish fund-raising organization is plowing ahead with its efforts to commemorate the Jewish state’s jubilee. The program will include one of America’s top envoys in the Middle East peace process as well as a leader…

NEW YORK, March 17 (JTA) — A slew of documents chronicling Eastern European Jewish life — sent to an American Jewish institution from Lithuania for cataloging — is at the center of an international dispute. In a recent Lithuanian newspaper article, archival officials in the Baltic nation charged that the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research…

NEW YORK, Feb. 10 (JTA) — The big money was in sight. But despite donning a black yarmulka on the advice of his rabbi, a Cuban-born Orthodox Jew failed to win $1 million when he missed a 3-point shot Saturday at the National Basketball Association’s All-Star Weekend in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. Saul…

NEW YORK, May 26 (JTA) — It’s an absurdity that Franz Kafka himself would appreciate. Some 1,500 people recently crowded into New York’s Town Hall for an evening devoted to a new translation of an unfinished novel that its author, now dead, had asked not be published. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Remnick put it…